Building on her critical reading of Sally Rooney’s Normal People a year ago, Becca Rothfeld surveys the characteristics of a genre she calls “sanctimony literature” in Liberties.
Amid a great deal of fanfare for Chris Power’s début novel, A Lonely Man, Ryan Ruby has stepped forth with a dissenting view in the New Left Review.
At the Los Angeles Review of Books, Samuel Liu reassesses the work of David Foster Wallace in light of an uncertainty about Wallace’s gifts, let alone his supposed “genius”.
In his regular column for Harper’s, Thomas Chatterton Williams takes aim at the #DisruptTexts movement, which advocates for the diversification of reading lists via the purging of titles that are not “relevant” to minority communities.
In a perceptive analysis at the Sydney Review of Books, James Ley tries to find a common thread between the novels of Jenny Erpenbeck and her new collection of essays.
In the latest issue of The Point, Tess McNulty tries to find the source of the hypnotic power of Kazuo Ishiguro’s otherwise unremarkable prose style.
Given the imminent publication of her latest collection of fictions, Worsted, Garielle Lutz does the pro forma Q&A thing — but gloriously — over at Fifteen Questions.
Echoing the disillusionment of Aida Edemariam, Madeleine Schwartz airs her misgivings about Sophie Mackintosh’s Blue Ticket in the London Review of Books.
At the Sydney Review of Books, James Ley casts an eye over the rambunctious prose of Ali Smith’s seasonal novels and finds Smith with a less-than-firm grip on her control mechanisms.
In a long, searching essay in Harper’s, Garth Greenwell takes a stand against the view that certain works of literature aren’t “relevant” to readers on the basis of their author’s identity.